I’m currently sitting in the library of my old highschool, about to help my mother teach Macbeth to a bunch of kids from the rural schools in the area.

For now I’m trying to finish some marking for the assistant lecturing job I worked hard to get, at the table where I used to study for my matric exams, and where I wrote a bad poem about using sunlight to warm my soul when my highschool boyfriend broke up with me. I’m staring out the same window I used to stare out whenever I was stuck on a Math problem, or wondering why the dude whose locker was next to mine didn’t like me back (he’s gay, Harriet).

I just took a trip to the prayer garden round the back of the building that looks out onto the river. I sat there dramatically in a cloud of gnats, and reflected on how many times I’ve stared out into my life-shaped abyss only have it stare back at me and say “baby girl, you’ll be grand.”

“I know you think everything demands to be felt so loudly, but you always bounce back from adversity with this insane tenacity and defiance. You’ll be fine, you’ll be fine, you’ll be fine.”

I’m sitting back where I first started. And I’d like to think that the inner-me who is still sitting in her school uniform, staring out onto the river and writing bad poetry about quick-moving clouds and her sunlight-coloured soul, would be pretty proud of how we’ve turned out.

This is sort of a continuation from my previous post because I have since realized a whole bunch of things from this morning.

The universe knows what it’s doing man.

There’s no point asking for it to “work with me” because it already is, in every single way possible.

I just went out with one of my dear friends and we spent hours talking shit and being honest with eachother. And it made me so incredibly happy to finally find that genuine human interaction I’ve been craving for so long, in a completely platonic capacity.

No confusion. No anxiety. No second-guessing everything they say.

It made me realise how incredibly unalone I am and how much the damn ebb and flow of everything knows exactly what it’s doing.

It feels like I’ve been drop-kicked this year. Just. fuck. Just drop-kicked.

And I guess parts of my trip through space and time and love and loss and life weren’t so terrible…it does feel like I’ve been well and truly sucker-punched in the abdomen and left winded on the pavement.

I’m alone again. Which is weird. I think I’ve always sort of dreaded this, this silence where there’s well and truly nothing else left but my thoughts about how things went wrong and why the universe just couldn’t fucking work in my favour this one time. Just work for me man. You always do, but right now the plan feels so freaking off-track, and I just wanted this little sliver of happiness to get me through life. This tiny nugget of hope and happiness and purity.

But it doesn’t fucking work that way. You can’t expect everything you want in life, then everything would be far too predictable.

So I’m alone. Again. And in desperate need of myself. And truly myself. I don’t think I feel like dealing with any complicated human interaction for a while, or any interaction at all for that matter.

I met someone who seemed so right for me. On days he was paying attention I was so happy, but during the times he was busy I felt so insecure and undervalued. And it was never anything he did, I think he just lived his life and we thought we recognized something in each other that might work, and then it didn’t.

The problem is how badly I wanted it to. It’s devastating how much faith I placed into this one, clearly wrong, human interaction. But it felt so real at the time. I’d like to think it was real. I’d like to think that for some small chunk of existence we were something real and good. Just wrong.

I’m disappointed.

That’s it. I am forced to mourn the loss of the “what if”, because I know “what” now. “What” is absolutely nothing.

My ex-boyfriend’s ring tone is still customized on my phone – two pings instead of one. We’ve been broken up for four months but I’ve still kept it, mainly because I’ve forgotten about it, but a small part of me still likes to hear those double bells and be reminded that for some small part of my life, I was undoubtedly loved.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot…the fact that for a year and a bit I got to experience extreme and undying devotion. It’s something not a lot of people get to have – a non-volatile, healthy relationship with zero games and very little anxiety.

I still cry about it sometimes.

Not because it ended, it had to end. There was no growth at the close, just me sobbing over how stagnant I felt and him trying his best to make me happy.

I cry over how freaking lovely it was to have someone hold my gypsy heart in their hands and treat it like it was the most precious thing on the entire earth. He never squeezed it too hard, he wouldn’t dare.

I have cut so many people out of my life that my phone is starting to feel like a graveyard of dead friendships and abandoned conversations. But I’m not sorry. I’ll never be sorry. From the burial mounds I’ve sprouted flowers, and from the silence I’ve curated peace.

Okay, I actually just took the morning off and the tears were an indirect consequence of it. I woke up hungover and devastated – every single emotion I’ve suppressed over the past few months rising to the surface of my soul – demanding to be felt. I’d kept them locked up for so long, feeding them distractions and unhealthy vices and bad poetry, I stifled their voices by pretending so desperately to be happy. It worked for a while. I think I’ve spent the last 8 months drifting in such a state of complacency that any emotion other than “being” scares the crap out of me – it’s such a stark reminder of my own humanity.

But on Friday I think they’d had enough.

The thing that made me sob loudly, uncontrollably, and very unattractively actually had nothing to do with me. I was simply an innocent bystander, watching an episode of Queer Eye, trying to make my head stop pounding and my serotonin start working. It was the episode where the Fab Five are trying to help the religious dude with the 6 kids who only gets about 2 hours of sleep every night. Bobby was helping him plant a new vegetable patch when suddenly he says something that literally made me sit up and howl violently into the void.

“Sometimes when you’re buried, you’re actually just planted”.

It was the most comforting thing I’ve ever heard.

Oh my God. I’m not buried. I’m not buried, this isn’t the end of anything. I’m just planted. my roots are taking hold and in a few months I’m going to bloom. I’m not buried, I’m not buried, I’m not buried…I’m just planted.

I cried out of relief for the rest of the morning, every single little twinge of regret or anxiety, or devastation poured out of me like a burst pipe. I mourned over the person I used to be, wept over who I’ve become and spoke blessings over who I will turn into. I smeared mascara all over my pillow and let my pain be felt. Sometimes these things demand to be addressed, wallowed in, and then let go.

I’m still very much not fine. It still feels like there’s an anvil sitting on my chest, but at least I’m no longer being suffocated by the debris that’s tried to claw its way down my throat.